07/11/2005

The carnival continues

Yuri Andrukhovych's play "Orpheus, Illegal" is currently playing at the Dusseldorf Schauspielhaus. The work has been rewritten several times to accomodate the growing disillusionment with life after the Orange Revolution and Europe's increasingly cold shoulder. An interview with Barbara Burckhardt.

Barbara Burckhardt: The hero of your play "Orpheus, Illegal", the travelling poet and political activist Stanislaw
Perfetzki, seems to be not
only your alter ego, but also identical to the protagonist of your
third novel "Perverzion" (read excerpt),
who likewise travels to Venice to
attend a conference and falls in love with the beautiful Ada. That was
in 1996. What has changed in Perfetzki's world in the past
nine years?

Yuri
Andrukhovych: The play and its characters are more political than the
novel was. This is partly due to the conceptual formulation of the Dusseldorf
project, which was aimed at addressing European phobias about Eastern Europe, and in part to my own politicisation in recent
years. I wrote the novel in 1994/95, in one of the first phases of
political stability in Ukraine. It's a very Baroque, postmodern and
polyphonic search for evidence, which is much more interested in trying
out stylistic, artistic possibilities than in political visions. I
finished the first version of "Orpheus, Illegal" in October 2004,
although the deadline was in fact the end of the year. I knew that
after October 31 and the first round of voting in the fateful Ukrainian
elections, I would have no time and - more importantly - no inner resources for writing. It was all or nothing. This first version is marked
by a pessimism that stems from experiences prior to the Orange
Revolution.

The Ukrainian elections turned out to be far more
exciting than people expected. There was the dioxin attack on Viktor
Yushchenko and the week-long demonstrations under the orange symbol on
Independence Square in Kiev. There was a proper, peaceful revolution
and in the middle of December, you gave a rousing speech (read full English translation) to the
European Parliament in Strasbourg in which you demanded that the EU
accept Ukraine into its union.

Yes, it was a time of absolute
euphoria. There was this feeling that the Ukrainian people who had been
kept in a state of apathy for decades had suddenly proved they had the
wisdom and strength to bring about democratic renewal after the brutal
and corrupt system of Leonid Kuchma. This had never seemed possible before.
European politicians flocked to Kiev and talked to us with respect,
even wonder. This fuelled hopes which were soon extinguished. We
were all hoping to hear "We want you" but after two months we were
offered nothing more than vague talk of being "close neighbours". It was a
rude awakening, which I worked into the second version of the play in
February to March this year.

Europe's reaction was certainly
disappointing. But the Orange Revolution also failed to keep its
promises. A week before the premiere of your play in Dusseldorf and
nine months after the revolution, Viktor Yushchenko got rid of his
prime minister and fellow campaigner Julia Timoshenko with allegations of
corruption.

My country is extremely disoriented at
present. I feel like a child whose parents are going through a messy
divorce. Yushchenko is a politician with integrity, but he's also slow
and hesitant. He's a good banker but he lacks the charisma of
Timoshenko, who's a brilliant speaker and an accomplished liar. Julia
Timoshenko has turned out to be a narcissistic, power-crazed figure who
obviously only used the revolution to further her own ends, and who
wouldn't have stood a chance without Yushchenko's popularity. It is no
surprise that they're going their separate ways, but nobody thought it
would happen so quickly or that they'd be so stupid about it. The split has destroyed
people's trust and I fear the old apathy is back, based on the general
assumption that all politicians are dirty. The only positive aspect,
perhaps, is that this feud was fought in public for the first time. The
overall sense of disappointment is huge. But there might be a silver
lining. The previous government was a bunch of divas; this one, at
least in part, is made up of grey technological bureaucrats. This could
signal an end of narcissism. What we are left with is the familiar
feeling that we have to start all over again. But since the Orange
Revolution, at least we know that the people are prepared to give it a
go.

In your play, Perfetzki escapes by feigning suicide. Where does he go? Where can he go?

If
I only knew ... In February 2005, when the problems were starting to
emerge, I wrote a poem which still has not been published although
everybody talks about it. It is a plea to Perfetski to come back,
because this is his time now Ã¢â¬â his chance to start all over again.
Perhaps he'll do as I tell him.

The Europe in your play doesn't
seem to be a convincing alternative. The near-death researcher
Casallegra talks about a "heart deficiency", in your collection of
essays "The Final Territory" you talked about the "Woolworthisation" of
the old continent. You imagine Venice, the cultural symbol of Europe, as
a sinking city.

My history with the West is a tale of
disappointment too. After independence in 1992, I went to Germany for
the first time and spent three months on a literary grant at the Villa
Waldberta near Munich. Afterwards I wrote a text "Introduction to
Geography" which is so euphoric, so naive that it makes me blush to
read it today ... I might as well have been kissing Bavarian soil. Around
that time I also spent 16 hours in Venice and was utterly captivated.
It felt more like home to me, all those cultural ruins, more unkempt
than Bavaria, but much more picturesque. I saw Ukraine on the verge of
crossing over to this fascinating old Europe.

And today?

In
my countless visits to western Europe this year I've got to know theignorance of the West. They know nothing about us but think they know
it all, and they're not prepared to learn a thing. Deaf ears are
everywhere, stereotypes, a self-satisfaction that results in
stagnation. There are no cultural perspectives in this
self-satisfaction, in France even less than in Germany. In the USA
where I lived for ten months in 2000/01, things were different. I
experienced a very different interest, a curiosity, although this was
purely within the academic world.

In "Orpheus,Illegal",
Casallegra predicts that an epidemic will break out in Venice by which he means Europe, an "epidemic of dehumanisation".

Casallegra is
a carnival philosopher. The carnival in general, not just in Venice,
represents theessence of European vitality, of liveliness, of
intoxicated escape from routine which renews people and keeps them
authentic. This is a tradition which seems to be disappearing in
Europe.

Carnivalism was central to the Bubabu project which turned you into a sort of pop poet in the years following 1985.
Another Bubabu representative, Zuzu Mauropule, also appears in the
Venetian congress in "Orpheus, Illegal". What is Bubabu?

Bubabu stands for burlesque, balahan (a farce or chaos in ancient Hebrewand which went on to mean a "fairground booth") and
buffoonery. It is a collective project involving Viktor Neborak, Oleksandr Irvanets
and myself, three very different poets, united solely by the stylistic
device of irony. By the way, although we see one another very
infrequently these days, the project would work as an ideal model for a
Ukrainian government: we have tolerated each other for 20 years
although we are all Ukrainian and as we say in this country, "For every
two Ukrainians there are three presidents."

We combined readings of our
poems with theatrical performances and rock music. It was a
poetry-carnival, circus-art, the highest and lowest side by side. We
wanted to
get away from poetry readings where half the audience fell asleep within
15 minutes. We wanted to make an impact, touch people, and we had
audiences of between 12 and 400 at over 100 performances, in opera
houses in Kiev and Lemberg among other places. In 1998 we founded the
Bubabu Academy and every year we selected a "poem of the year". The
winners were invited to participate in our performances and were
awarded a bottle of the most expensive schnapps we could get our hands
on.
A high percentage initiative.

Yes,
and it worked
very well for quite a while. In 1994, we celebrated our 100th
anniversary Ã¢â¬â which we arrived at by adding together our ages; in 2000
we celebrated our 1,000th anniversary. Then this year was the 20th
jubilee with two performances in Kiev and Lemberg. We are really a
bit too old for Bubabu, and the next generation of poets which is
unbelievably serious, sad and boring is highly critical of us. The good
thing is, though, that our audiences are exactly as young as they were
in 1985, between 18 and 25. My novel "Perverzion" was really my
farewell to Bubabu. The congress in it is called "the
post-carnivalistic absurdity of the world". But the carnival continues.Yuri Andrukhovych's "Orpheus, Illegal" next plays at the Schauspielhaus in Dusseldorf on November 18.

*

The article originally appeared in the magazineTheater heute from November 2005.
Yuri
Andrukhovych (website) was born in 1960 in Stanislau, today called
Ivano-Frankivsk, in Galicia, West Ukraine. He has been publishing poems, novels and essays
since 1982. Andrukhovych currently lives and works in Berlin on a DAAD
stipend.

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